Efficient modeling of heat conduction in multiply bonded composites covered with thermal barrier coating

In engineering practice, 3D (three-dimensional) composites consisting of multiply thin layers of anisotropic materials have been extensively applied. For enhancing their thermal endurance, the composites are often coated with a very thin layer of medium with low conductivity, usually referred to as the thermal barrier coating (TBC). This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the boundary element method (BEM) to accurately compute the nearly singular integrals in modeling 3D anisotropic heat conduction in TBC-coated composites, consisting of several thin anisotropic media. This algorithm is especially efficient because no analytical transformation of the integrands is involved as proposed in the past. When the TBC is prescribed with Dirichlet condition, a new equivalent convective condition is proposed to replace the TBC modeling. Moreover, thin films of adhesives on interfaces are considered by introducing interfacial conductance. In the end, several examples are presented.